We Saw The Shuttle Lift Off, Right At The Cape!

One of the 'bucket list' items I have wanted to do with my Dad was to see, hear and feel the Space Shuttle when it launches from Cape Canaveral. We had that very opportunity today and took full advantage of it.

With Luann's new camera that has an 18X zoom, we were able to get this close.

This is how close my camera can get with its 10X zoom lens...

When you see what we're having to 'shoot' through, not bad at all...
The launch pad is located above the blue canopy to the left of the red van.

Before the action began, Luann and Katrina decided to pick up a few T-Shirts as momentos of the experience. I think Dad likes his.

Well, here we go! The smoke and steam plume begins to shoot out the right-hand side.

Smoke and steam is now billowing out of the left side too, but the space shuttle hasn't begun to lift off yet.

As the Space Shuttle now lifts off the pad, the light from the SRBs (Solid Rocket Boosters) and main engines on the shuttle becomes very obvious.

Man, look at that thing go! The white cloud must be spreading out to something like 2 miles wide now...

From this view, you can see the main engines and the SRBs are working hard.

Ok, a quick pull-back to check on the overall progress as the shuttle punches through the clouds...

And back to the close-up view of the shuttle...

You can see the arc the shuttle takes on its climb into the heavens. At about this point, the rumbling sounds and the shaking ground produced by the shuttle launch has finally reached us. Very impressive!

Yep, I'm snapping away with Luann's camera while she decided to take a couple of shots from behind me. Can you see the shuttle on the screen of her camera that I'm holding?

Here is what I was taking pics of. The SRBs have just separated from the shuttle and the fuel tank assembly.

and now they are falling farther away from the shuttle. All looks good...

The solid fuel has now burned up on the SRBs, and you can see them in full sideways profile, yet they are still emitting something of a smoke contrail.

This is the last shot I could get of the shuttle, as it is well on its way to the space station.

This was definitely well worth the time and effort to get out here, then drive back in the stop and go traffic (over 3 hours) to get back home. I'm so glad Dad was here with us to view the launch of STS-124 Discovery.

Road Trip Back To Florida

After Mom's Fun-morial, we went over the van very carefully in preparation for the drive back to Florida. We put on new tires, changed the oil/filter, the air filter, wiper blades, etc... With the exception of the air conditioning dying one-third of the way across Texas, everything went pretty well. We even picked up a geocache for every state we traveled through (of course).

As you can see, we had a teddybear traveling companion with us. Whenever we passed a car or bus with kids in it, Dad would wave the teddybear out the half-open window at the kids.

This was a big mistake on my part... We ended up driving on I-10 through Houston at 5:30 on Tuesday afternoon. Nothing like rush hour traffic to make you appreciate driving on I-10 at 3 in the morning... Maybe next time.

Looks like we made it to Louisiana. We tried for 2 geocaches here, but one was missing and the other was just too deep in the woods for a quick Park & Grab. We ended up finding one at the welcome center on the exit side (in our direction) of the state.

When we tried to find the first (missing) cache, we came across this cute frog near where the container was supposed to be.

Then, the next morning we saw this good-sized lizard hanging around outside of the hotel we stayed at in Lafayette, LA.

At the point where the A/C gave out, I decided to try to tighten the window locking lever. Unfortunately, the piece of metal that was used was hardened, so I ended up breaking it off. I had to make up this Rube Goldberg device to keep the window shut.

There's the van in the parking lot, and the cache we are looking for is under that metal plank running across the sidewalk.

This thing was loaded with travel coins. We picked one up to bring it back home.

Ah, Mississippi, we're getting closer...

Oh cool! A tunnel! Here we gooooo!

Ok, now watch out for the truck...

Hooray! We made it through! And I passed that pesky blue truck too...

We even passed by the USS Alabama battleship. No time to stop though, I was told that I needed to be back at work tomorrow (Thursday) to teach some students from Poland. Some day, I'm going to have to visit that thing. Take a look in the mirror and see how close the truckers like to get on our back bumper...

Since Dad had taken his 'water pill', we had to increase our bathroom stops some (actually, I was sick to my stomach too, so the extra stops were welcomed by me).

Since I didn't need to visit the facilities on this stop, I decided to pick up a quick geocache near where we parked. This one wasn't so bad...

At the time this picture was taken, we still had quite a way to go, because we actually arrived at the house by 12:30 AM (Thursday morning). It was a tough, grueling trip but we made it. It took 3 days, 2250 miles and $621.00 (158.928 gallons) in gas to get home.

Yep, we made it, just in time for me to get up at 6:00 AM and get back to work...

Geocaching In The Desert

For a little distraction, Luann & I decided to do a little geocaching. Uncle Frank went along and decided he liked it. He signed up and immediately went to work, passing up Karen's score (she has 18 finds, he found 19 during his stay in Arizona). [Editorial Note: We visited Uncle Frank at his house a couple of weeks after this was posted and we discovered he accidentally 'double-dipped' one of his posts, so after he cleared that up, he actually has 18 finds, the same amount as Karen. The contest is now on!]And he did it by chasing down a wide array of them, from simple 'Park & Grabs' to an Earthcache. At his prodding, we even did a puzzle cache during the day that was designed to be done at night, and we found it. Man, he is good! Following are pictures of several of his first finds.

This one was his first 'nano'' geocache, a container so small, it was concealed as part of a bolt.

Here is one hidden inside of a plastic fence post. It turned out to be a stainless steel thermos container beneath the fencepost cap to Luann's left.

This one was a nicely engineered cache that was built into a fence post cap. Yep, that big 'honker' in Uncle Frank's hands was tucked into a fence pole.

This is a mailbox cache that also had a note on the white fence, asking us to sign our names on it. Of course we obliged...

Gotta get just the right picture for the weblog...

Uncle Frank was like a bloodhound sniffing out a rabbit, but in this case, the rabbit turned out to be a lizard. Click on the picture to see what he's pointing at.

I'm the King of the Rock Pile! At least for the moment...
Looks like the young whipper-snapper is about to fall from his not-so-lofty perch!

Oh, I forgot to mention that Luann's parents went along with us for some of the caches we were hunting.

This is a marker for a geocache we were supposed to look for at night. That's because it uses reflectors that you typically find at night with a flashlight. Uncle Frank decided we could beat this one during the day, and he was right. Found it!!!

Ah, a saguaro cactus would be a good hiding spot.

Peek-aboo! We see you!

This one is located at the former site of the Grand Hotel. The Grand Hotel was where Luann's senior prom was held. We had a great time that night. Sad to see the hotel is gone now...

It's nice to see that geocachers are welcome at this site. It only took Uncle Frank a couple of minutes to discover that the logsheet is a slide-out card built into the sign (after looking under the rocks first).

This one is located in a washout area inside a piece of wood. Flip it over and there it is!

This one is another nano-cache that was magnetically stuck to the underside of the electrical box. It is so small, that the little black dots in front of him are the halves of the tiny container, and he has the tiny scroll of paper in his left hand in order to sign his initials on it. It took more time to roll the logsheet up and put it back into the container than it took to find it.

All-in-all, Uncle Frank has shown a natural knack for discovering well-engineered concealment devices, and has professed a desire to continue looking for them. Weeeee-haw!!!

The Balloon Release

This was really neat. We decided to release the helium balloons that were at the Fun-Morial the next morning. Some of them didn't quite perform as we had hoped and were bouncing around on the ground, but eventually, we got them all moving...

Here are the balloons, arriving at the Fun-morial.

We had a bunch of them here, looks like the skys will be filled tomorrow!

Get ready, get set...

What I wrote on my balloon...

A semi-tribute phrase loosely borrowed from Jimmy Hendrix. I was hoping to get pictures of what everybody else wrote on their balloons, but I just wasn't fast enough.

Go! Looks like Jody & Treesie are having to help out a couple of them.

Some went up, some went down, some even went sideways... along the ground.

See, they got them off the ground!

Up, up, and awaaaay!

'Scuse me while I touch the sky...